MeowdyPardner

From the related post linked by op, it’s described as just a portion of the managed instance hosting fee going back to the project devs. So if you pay them to host a lemmy instance, a small cut goes to Lemmy devs. Doesn’t seem sketchy at all. Seems to have nothing to do with monetizing the instance itself, which could be funded by voluntary donations as normal or you could probably do membership fees as some instances do. It seems this is just about giving funding to the software devs. Hopefully this encourages other managed hosting providers to also give a cut of their revenue to the software they are using for their business.

Haha I’m glad you found it inspiring - I only ever intended for it to be a temporary exercise in overkill networks but I love squeezing ISPs for what they’re worth and I just kept getting lucky.

Beware that getting multi gig wan is a very good excuse to overkill your network with 10gig firewalls, switches, and the latest bleeding edge draft-standard-based wifi gear, on the plus side you will always have a retort when someone online says you could never need mgig home gear because surely your wan can’t be more than a gig anyway.

I think a better comparison re: cars would be if inspections could only be performed by Ford or GM and the inspection rules were made by them instead of the government. They could say: we’re no longer passing inspections on models older than 5 years old, or if you used non-approved oil or filters the toll roads are gonna block you. They could put ads on your infotainment system and say you won’t get an inspection pass if you block them or replace the infotainment system with something else. Did you bypass the subscription lock on your heated seat? No more highway driving for you.

Ok so strap in…

It started with splurging on gigabit pro, the obscure fiber service they will only sell if you call a special number, have a back and forth with a small property manager, and wait for them to check your proximity to fiber and get approval from their finance department on top of a $1000 install fee (discountable to $500). Once I had gigabit pro (6 months and several approvals later), things got started as a result of repeatedly humoring the comcast salespeople every time they called to try to upsell me to cable TV. Since none of the residential salespeople were familiar with gigabit pro, which is installed and managed by the business side “metro-e” division of comcast, they were always shocked to see I was being billed $150/mo and assured me they could get me TV bundled and reduce my price (gigabit pro is often discounted so I was getting 2 years at 50% off the standard $300/mo price, I was actually planning on cancelling as soon as that ran out because there would also be an early cancellation fee). They would spend like an hour trying and failing to get the billing system to bundle in TV because I assume the residential billing system is probably only set up to bundle TV with residential high frequency cable internet packages. Eventually they would give up and tell me they would reach back out. Sometime later, I would get another sales call from someone else offering a TV bundle and the whole thing would repeat again.

I think I spent a total of 6 hours on the phone across several occasions spanning a month or more (multitasking of course) just being entertained that they couldn’t figure it out when one day the salesperson got their manager to override the billing system and they re-entered my plan from scratch. Every step of the way I told them I was happy with my speed (I was hoping that way they wouldn’t notice I was managed by the metro-e team) and would only agree to bundle if they also dropped the 2 year contract I was in, and they agreed. So when they re-entered my plan, they erroneously entered in regular gigabit service. Since there would be no speed change I guess they didn’t even look at the modem provisioning let alone notice that my “modem” was listed as the Juniper fiber switch that is normally rented out for fiber service.

Later I cancelled the TV part of the plan and was just left with the gig pro fiber service while my internet bill went down to the normal gig price. Not being completely satisfied I later called a few more times trying to negotiate my bill even lower. When I finally succeeded at negotiating my bill a few more dollars lower over live chat support, they made the mistake of sending me an xfinity combo modem/router self install kit - maybe because I didn’t have a modem attached to my account that the system understood. I decided to just try to activate it and see what would happen, surprisingly I was able to activate it on my account while the fiber service was still active. I took advantage of having an actual returnable modem and swapped it out with a purchased modem to get rid of the modem rental fee which I was originally made to pay for the fiber switch, which further lowered my bill. So to this day I have 2gig symmetric SFP+ with an additional 1gig symmetric rj45 powered by fiber as well as the standard cable modem with an additional 1gig non-symmetric connection for a total of 4 gigabit download and 3.035gig upload.

To top that all off for several years I gave 1 gig out of the 4 that I now have combined to our neighbors through a moca adapter so for a large portion of my time here I have only paid $40/mo split with 4 total roommates, so my monthly portion would be $10/mo

TL;DR: I splurged like a $500 install fee to get gigabit pro which is super obscure and took 6 months to get all the approvals, then I kept interacting with customer support and salespeople while taking advantage of their confusion and the fact that the residential folks don’t interface with the business fiber / metro-e folks to reduce my bill by tricking them into billing me standard residential price with a TV bundle that the salespeople REALLY want to sell you on, then I continued haggling for a few more dollars off resulting in them sending me a normal modem, which I set up and immediately swapped out with my own modem for even more money off. I also ended up splitting this extremely haggled bill with our neighbors (in addition to roommates) so my monthly portion has ended up being $10 since these 4 gigabits are split among 9 people who combined rarely even exceed 1 gig.

I’m about to move away but currently I cheat Comcast out of gig pro in the Boston area for the price of regular gig service, $90/mo for fiber to the basement, 2gig symmetric sfp+ and a separate 1gig symmetric rj45. Highly recommend if you can avoid paying the full $300/mo price (not sure if the full price has changed in 5 years but that’s what it would have been if I didn’t confuse the fuck out of customer support to get them to incorrectly bill me). I’ve tested both lines simultaneously and was able to max out both at a combined 3gig up/down using 2 simultaneous speed tests.

It’s hit or miss but in my experience as long as you can find one with the same release group as the video file you have it should sync up

Nice tip, though don’t forget to share some trackers too, I’ve been stuck at 0% on a torrent someone shared as only the infohash. I’m guessing their DHT isn’t working, and despite adding trackers, without knowing what trackers any of the other seeds are using it’s just a guessing game adding open trackers blindly, or a waiting game hoping I can find peers using DHT.

This container is great, I use it for my arrstack. If the VPN connection goes down, the container infinitely restarts until it can get a connection again.

I’m miffed that mullvad did away with recurring subscriptions, so you have to remember to refill the account if you have stuff relying on it.

It sounds like it’s the same situation as the TI calculator signing key which I think was brute forced many years ago, allowing custom firmware to be developed. And also any DVD ripping program which is able to bypass CSS which is also based on a master key that was figured out or leaked. There’s a decent pedigree of master keys not being copyrightable, much to the MPAA / TI lawyers chagrin

Hetzners risk averseness is so annoying. I tried to sign up and rent a dedi to replace my rack mount nas. Considering electric costs I was happy to pay a few hundred a month for substantial storage. Didn’t realize they didn’t accept privacy.com cards (I don’t even use them to cancel, it’s just so I can change banks and switch 1 billing link instead of 100). Account rejected and deleted and no response from support.

At some point I exceeded 500, but I also have firefox simple tab groups (formerly known as panorama) so I’m usually not looking at a window of more than 100 at a time, and any tabs I haven’t visited since last launch aren’t loaded into ram until I click over to them so they behave more like bookmarks except instead of creating/organizing/cleaning up bookmarks in addition to tabs I just browse/organize/close tabs. Each rabbit hole I go down gets a tab group so if I’m done with a topic I can just close the whole group.

My understanding of the term (from an asian american perspective I guess) is that it at most has a connection to race through the origins of ricing, and since the origins and current usage has never seemed derogatory and is simply about the Asian origins of automotive ricing I don’t think it’s racist at all. I see it as no different to any other term that reflects the origins of something that is connected to a specific ethnicity, especially when the term isn’t derogatory and isn’t used to otherize (which is how I consider model-minority stereotypes to be racist despite not being “negative”).

I also believe in free housing and transit access as a right.

I prefer to do ublock origin/sponsorblock + patreon. Gives the creators a bigger cut and I still don’t see ads. I’m currently at $15/mo across all creators but judging by Louis Rossmann’s video on lifetime ad revenue per user it doesn’t seem hard to offset any loss from ad blocking (iirc he said it was like <$1 of ad revenue for your lifetime of watching a creator). So I feel pretty good about giving most of the channels I watch casually $1/mo, especially when patreon’s cut is so much smaller than youtube premium’s.

It uses the zip archive feature that they allow you to request and export so at least it doesn’t use a direct connection or API. I think there is also some EU rule or something about requiring it because Dansup was asking about filing a complaint because of the export format being convoluted or something, not sure of the details but hopefully that means there’s some legal weight to the export feature sticking around.

Not really but sometimes if I need a visualization of something complicated that I can’t see in my head I’ll go to the network tab under insights in github

Hah, it also caught me off guard that they’re reusing the name wikitrubune, I signed up for the old one and found it to be really boring. It’s interesting that he’s planning to add activitypub support to this attempt, though I’ll only be interested when it’s not a “in the far future” plan and instead right around the corner.

Same, I figure as long as they don’t push me to use the cloud connected backup feature I’m ok. I also started backing up the totp keys to my selfhosted bitwarden as an extra measure on top of my regular NAS+rsync.net backups of the qr images

It used to be very buggy, but it’s gained a lot of polish recently, especially if you haven’t used it since Spaces were introduced. Sometime before then I think the cross verification/signing user flow for E2E key management also greatly improved with the introduction of QR and emoji based cross-device verification for syncing encryption between existing signed-in sessions to newly signed in devices. The only bug I ever notice these days is the “mark as read” quick action in android notifications being broken on notifications older than a couple hours.